I Found A 1962 “Junk Silver” Quarter

Here in Arizona we have notoriously bad tasting tap water. So, every week I take our four 1 gallon jugs, a pocket full of quarters and go to the gas station where they have a water purification machine.

As I walked up to the machine and put my first quarter in, and readied for the machine to start spraying water everywhere, it spit the quarter back at me. “Damn thing”, I thought as put it back in the slot, only to have the machine reject it again. I looked at the coin return button and made sure it was not broken, and put the quarter in a third time, with quite a bit more bravado.

This time, it spit it out from the return slot and onto the ground. As the quarter bounced on the ground, it made a more tinny noise than normal. Skeptical, I looked at the quarter to see if it was perhaps fake. Instead, I noticed that it was made in 1962. I turned it sideways and saw that the usual brown stripe of Zinc was not there. It was in fact a 90% Silver 1962-D quarter. Imagine my surprise while I googled it’s value as the jugs were filling and found out my troublesome coin was worth about 3.01.